The Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (OGSI) Award honors over 200 UC Berkeley GSIs each year for their outstanding work in teaching. These OGSI recipients are nominated from within their teaching department. The GSI Teaching & Resource Center gives the award recipients certificates of distinction and a celebratory ceremony in the spring. In addition, currently enrolled graduate students who receive the OGSI award will receive a $250 stipend, sponsored by the dean of the Graduate Division, to applaud outstanding GSIs.

Howell is a third year Ph.D. student at the School of Information; she is interested in the materiality of information representation, designing affective systems, and intimacy and HCI. Her work explores interactions with physiological signals in daily life. She develops alternative representations of these signals and studies experiences and interpretations around these artifacts, leveraging material properties to create new associations and interpretations. Through broadening the design space around biosensing, she probes what relationships with physiological data might mean for our social relationships and sense of self.